Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Solmancer" data-source="post: 4243522" data-attributes="member: 65199">Hi, peanut gallery here, which is to say I have what others would consider a casual interest in D&D at best (which is to say I have very little exposure).  So, I'd like to present myself as a largely unbiased party. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  I'm just going to snip out the parts and respond to the relevant points to which I'm going to respond.  Keep in my mind this is strictly my opinion though...  Additionally, I'm also speaking as someone who did a 4 hour "preview", which is to say one of the employees at the game store I frequent ran two sessions through the day with Keep on the Shadowfell, and I was involved in the first.A lot of information is actually not conveyed by Keep on the Shadowfell.  For example, there are a few powers that are based off of whether your target(s) is/are marked, bloodied, or some other status condition.  To my recollection, nothing that the PC characters get involve those statuses, as far as augmented effects.  Arguably a bad choice in power selection by the adventure creators, but in some ways beggers can't be choosers here.  So in other words, there is indeed fluff to explain it in the PHB, to my understanding (I've tried to do my homework a little). <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but then again I'm making a big assumption about what you mean by computer gaming.  For the purposes of not making a hee-haw out of "u" and "me", could you clarify what you mean by that?Call me crazy, but the Wizard arguably needed its resource management removed, at least for the lower strength spells.  First of all, Magic Missile no longer scales except with, I believe, your Int modifier.  I was told by someone who playtested 4e (the DM of the adventure, as it happens) that it didn't, anyway.  In other words, a Wizard's magic, not their ranged weapon (crossbow, bow, whatever) is their standard ranged attack.  Now, I'm just the peanut gallery, but that seems appropriate to me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The spell/power choices were just for the sake of the pregenerated characters.  I guess they wanted to adhere to the KISS* principle as much as possible.  One thing about the char sheets provided, though, was I kept wanting to add numbers that had already been factored into their calculations (the rogue especially I was having to redo math, since it had an intrinsic +1 to attack rolls when using daggers and the char sheet reflected that for standard attacks).With any new product, or rather with any new edition to it, you have to have novelty and innovation.  Otherwise, what's the point?  Even in computer gaming, new patches are generally hoped to contain new features, if not improvements to the software in particular.  If 4e doesn't have at least one or the other in some way (preferably both, if you ask me), I again ask, "What's the point?"  We could argue back and forth about whether 4e is an improvement over 3.0/3.5e all day, but at the end that would just be subjective at its heart; everything has a dissenter (this is not to say you are one).* KISS Principle = Keep It Simple Stupid (for those who don't know)</blockquote>

Verification